Category Archives: Computer Ramblins

When I feel that I have something to say or share relating to computers, this will be where it goes.

Emoticons and Smileys…. Pro, Con or Neutral?

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On a recent comment to a recent post that appeared on these pages, I noticed that the commenter ended a tongue-in-cheek sentence with this smiley ;).   Like everyone else who has used a computer lately, I have seen an array of these little faces everywhere on the internet that I visit.   But I was totally surprised to find this little fella living in my blog comments 8-O.   I thought that the person who left that comment must be super-cool (which he is, of course) 8).   Although I know that it is a sin, I couldn’t help but be green with envy over this person’s computing skills :mrgreen:.  

Not long after seeing that a smiley had taken up residence in my blog, I happened to end a sentence with an old-school “;)”, when, much to my chagrin :? this little guy appeared instead ;).   “What the heck is going on here?” I asked myself (as no one else happened to be in the room at the time) :roll:.   And then it dawned on me that Wordpress might be involved in some way :idea:.  It made me very sad that I had no knowledge about the care and feeding of these smiley creatures, so off I went, searching the Wordpress documentation for clues about this feature :(.   The documentation indicated that Wordpress does include a feature that translates old-school emoticons into these little smileys.  This made me very happy indeed :D.

Now that I had learned Wordpress supported smileys, I needed to find a listing of the smileys available for my use.  Off I went to search the internet for answers :arrow:.   A search on “emoticons” eventually led me to a blog with a post regarding emoticons.  The individual who wrote this post was very angry with computer users who use the services of the smiley critters :x.   In the comments that followed this post, there was a very intelligent discussion among the participants involving the use of emoticons in general, and smileys specifically.  Some considered the smileys to be evil :evil:  twisted creatures :twisted: undeserving of life itself.  Others found the smileys to be cute and helpful in expressing nuances of feeling that are hard to put into words.  Some even expressed disdain for anyone who would consider using smileys :P.  And here I was, doing research to find out how to use these little animated dots.  It was almost enough to make me cry :cry:. 

Like many other things that I don’t think about when I’m not thinking, I never thought that emoticons and smileys could arouse so many emotions in so many people:!:   So now I am perplexed as to what to do – utilize smileys, or ignore them and hope that they go away. 

What is your opinion?

Giving Credit Where Credit Is Due

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In this day and age, when it sometimes seems as if the business community is out of touch with the customers upon whom they depend,  it is refreshing to see one company respond quickly and politely to a customer’s concern over a potential problem.  I am referring to the good people at snapshirts.com, who have earned my respect and praise for their response to my concerns, and more important, for their response to the blogging community at large.

Here is a little background.  If you are a frequent visitor to blogs of any genre, you may remember a period of time earlier in the year when suddenly, it seemed as if every blog in existence posted an image of what is called a “word cloud”.  The clouds that were posted on these blogs were primarily generated from the snapshirts.com website mentioned above.  From comments on the blogs at the time, it became apparent that word clouds were very well accepted by bloggers and their readership.  This generated a lot of traffic at snapshirts.com, who is in the business of selling products utilizing the word cloud concept.

Recently, one of the blogs that I regularly read indicated that there had been a marked increase in comment spam, and the author wondered what could have caused the sudden increase.  As I thought about this, for unknown reasons my mind flashed back to the word cloud I had seen on that site.  Could this be the culprit, I wondered?  By performing a search on “word cloud”, I was able to locate numerous blogs that had posted their own version of a word cloud.  By than searching those blog’s archives for “spam”, it soon became apparent that many of those blogs had also experienced an increase in spam.  Could the increase in comment spam have been caused by the submission of their URLs to the snapshirts.com site?  I am not well versed in this type of thing.  I can’t fathom why spam even exists in the first place, let alone figure out how it is accomplished.  So I thought, “why not ask snapshirts.com directly?”  Here is the correspondence that ensued:

On 5/2/06, Hal Mitzenmacher wrote:

There are many people in the blogging community who have noticed a marked increase in comment spam on their blogs since submitting their URLs to Snapshirts.  Is there more going on here than meets the eye?  If you were to perform a web search on snapshirts + spam, and then examine the result, you will see what I am referring to.  Would you please address this issue on your blog for those of us who may feel doubts about continuing the use of your services?

Thank you.

 

Response from snapshirts.com:

Mr. Mitzenmacher,

First, I want to thank you.  You have brought a flaw in our old fulfillment methodology to our attention.  Upon receiving your message we immediately took what steps we could to rectify the situation.  In the past, we had included the weblog URL on the T-shirt’s order page to ensure customers received the T-shirt that was directly linked to their blog.  This inadvertently made those URLs available on the Internet for persons with malicious intent.  We have subsequently updated our fulfillment technology to allow instant T-shirt generation and purchase, so we no longer publish any information beyond the image.  After receiving your message yesterday and realized what had likely occurred, we immediately removed all pages from the Internet that were generated using our older methodology.  Those pages are no longer accessible over the Internet.

Second, I assure you that I have NO direct affiliation with ‘sploggers’, comment spammers or spam providers of any sort.  If you want to call, my cellphone number is xxx-xxx-xxxx and if I could afford a ticket to the Ozarks I’d fly out so you could look me in the eye on this one.  Weblog producers are our sole customers and we are very sensitive to the highest standards of customer service that must be maintained in serving this community.  We were taken advantage of but in no way did we collude with anyone to produce this unfortunate result.

Third, you mention other bloggers experiencing this effect and commenting on it.  I searched the “snapshirts + spam” combination on Google, Google Blog Search, IceRocket, Bloglines and Technorati but was unable to find another blog post on this issue.  If you are aware of other blog posts or bloggers with this issue I’d appreciate any link so that I can address this issue personally with them as well. Last, but most certainly not least, I want to apologize for any inconvenience this has caused you.  I will be posting a notice on our blog today with this information and links to free tools and add-ons for various weblog systems which can be installed to combat comment spam.  For wordpress, I use Spam Karma, which has a 100% record on my personal blog for catching comment spam and permitting actual comments.

Sincerely,

Jonah Keegan

snapshirts.com

 

My reply to snapshirts.com:

Mr. Keegan, 

As I read the original email that I submitted to you, specifically, 

“There are many people in the blogging community who have noticed a marked increase in comment spam on their blogs since submitting their URLs to Snapshirts” … 

I can see that I might have been a little vague regarding other bloggers experiences.  I did not mean to imply by this statement that other bloggers necessarily made a connection between the increase in spam they were experiencing and the submitting of their URLs to Snapshirts.  I am the one who made this connection when, while visiting many differing types of blogs on a regular basis, I began to notice a pattern.  There was a short period of time when it seemed as if  every blogger in cyberspace was posting their own word clouds.  Here is a comment I made on one blog’s Word Cloud post:

“A Google search of “word cloud” now produces over 11,200,000 hits, mostly from bloggers! I wonder how many t-shirts Snapshirt will sell? And how long before a Wordpress “Word Cloud” plugin appears?” 

Shortly thereafter, many of these same blogs began reporting an increase (sometimes dramatic) in the volume of comment spam they received.  This can probably best be seen by using the same methodology as I did.  Perform a search to find blogs that posted their word clouds, and then, from within each individual blog, perform a blog search of posts pertaining to comment spam.  When I saw the results obtained with this methodology, my suspicions became aroused.  Whether there is a cause-and-effect relationship, I don’t know, as I know little about comment spam (other than the fact that it is obnoxious and annoying).  It might well be that this same methodology would yield statistically identical results by searching these very same blogs for “sun spots”, for example.  I just do not know.  Which is exactly why I contacted you to inform you of my suspicions.

The tone and speed of your reply indicates your sincerity about this issue.  No need for you to travel out to the Ozarks so I can “look you in the eye”,  however, should you ever get the chance, I’m certain you would find the area a delightful place to visit.

Hal Mitzenmacher

 

Snapshirts.com response:

Thank you.  I can tell you our sales are far less than 11.2 million, wouldn’t that be something…  :)  We are very grateful to the blogging community however, for providing us such a uniformly positive reception and sending us a steady stream of visitors.

I can also tell you we are working to develop a free word cloud plugin for wordpress or any blog, with some features we hope will appeal to bloggers as much as our t-shirts do.

Thanks again for bringing this to my attention.

Sincerely,

Jonah Keegan

 

I have checked the snapshirts.com website today and I have found that they have, indeed been hard at work addressing this issue (see post here).  And as a showing of confidence, here is the word cloud that I have just produced from the snapshirts.com website:

Ranch Ramblins word cloud

If They Can Do It, So Can I

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Back in 2001, the local telephone company in our area (Northern Arkansas Telephone Co) undertook a project whereby each and every telephone pole was identified and mapped using GPS technology.  To accomplish this task, a small group of NATCO employees were equipped with ATVs and GPS units.  After spending each day following the telephone lines and entering each pole as a way point on their GPS units, the team would then upload this information into the NATCO computers, and thus an accurate survey of NATCO’s telephone poles was completed.

When the NATCO ATV showed up on our ranch to survey our poles, I took the opportunity to talk to the technician, and I became intrigued by the notion of mapping out the features of our ranch.  I saw that the equipment that he used was fairly simple stuff, which gave me the necessary impetus to undertake a mapping project of my own.

Back when Retta and I were cruising among the Channel Islands off the California coastline, GPS navigation was a necessity, so I was quite familiar with GPS units and their capabilities.  Our GPS unit was tied in to our laptop computer.  The end result was that we could do our chart work in real-time, with the location of our vessel accurately depicted on our electronic maritime charts.  When we sold the vessel, the GPS unit went with it, but now, here was my excuse to justify the purchase of an inexpensive hand-held GPS unit (I confess to a personal weakness that prompts me to try and find any justification for acquiring new technological gadgets).  So I purchased a Magellan GPS device, and soon had it wired to my laptop computer.  I also needed some type of mapping software, and settled on Delorme 3-D TopoQuads.  This software is fairly full-featured and inexpensive, and while it is accomplishing all that I want it to do, it seems somewhat cumbersome to use, as if it were designed in a prior software era.  Now, all I had to do was tie this all together into a package that could actually be used on the ranch. Here is what eventually evolved from my efforts.

Mapping System Components

Notice the following features of my “super-duper, multi-purpose, portable cartographic data collection machine”  (SDMPPCDCM).

A) High-tech Rubbermaid containers are utilized to house the necessary components, as well as providing sun-shading capabilities for daytime use.  These are inexpensive, readily available, and coincidentally, just the right dimensions to fit snugly into our utility vehicle.

B) This application for a laptop computer consumes lots of power.  The computer cannot use any power saving modes while mapping, the screen must be set for full power to be visible in the daylight, and the hard disk drive and CDrom are always busy performing mapping chores. Rather than trying to create a properly conditioned power supply from the utility vehicle’s electrical system, which would have been a project unto itself, I opted to power the system with an automotive rechargeable booster pack, available (of course) from our local Wal-Mart.  By adding a simple and inexpensive power inverter, this system can be operated at full power for a lot more hours than I care to work in a day.

C) The laptop is affixed to the turntable by a pair of stabilizing rails on the side of the turntable, and secured with industrial Velcro attached to the bottom of the computer.  The turntable swivels on a simple pivot, allowing me to easily adjust the viewing angle.  The entire package is secured to the vehicle with a heavy duty bungee cord.

D) The GPS unit, which feeds data to the computer via a data cable, is mounted on the dashboard of the vehicle with a quick-release mount built especially for this particular GPS unit.  This allows for excellent visibility while driving, and allows me to easily pop off the GPS and use it on foot when necessary.

When mounted in the utility vehicle, the entire contraption appears as below:

Mapping system in place

An example of the results obtained with this system can be seen in the following map printout, which is a screen shot from the Delorme mapping software.  This particular map layer that is pictured shows the trail network as it exists on the ranch.  There are unlimited layers available, and I have used them for many purposes.

Mapping results

You may ask, “Hal, what prompts you to spend so much time rambling on about computerized mapping systems and such?”   Pablo, editor of the Roundrock Journal, a fine and highly popular Missouri blog, recently mused about solitary shag bark hickory and walnut trees on his property.  The question arose as to weather solitary trees of this type would produce nuts.  I suppose a normal person who is motivated to find an answer to this question would, with a few well-defined queries to Google, come up with an answer in short order.  But I am (thankfully) not normal!

Three years ago, I began a long-term project of mapping the approximately 150 black walnut trees that exist on the ranch.  Each year, I use my GPS data to locate each of these trees, and I note their status as being either “nut-bearing” or not, as the case may be.  I then use this data to plan my bush-hogging schedule, so that the trees are accessible to my friend Jasper when he comes around in the fall to gather our black walnuts.  It is my thought that I can utilize the data that I am collecting to answer the pressing question of solitary nut trees (if I should be fortunate to live long enough to collect a meaningful amount of data).  I am also attempting to see if I can find any direct correlation between nut production and weather patterns.  This may be grist for a future post (if I can find any results worth posting).